Content Syndication — Hurts Or Heals Your SEO?
Content marketing is not just writing fancy and unique content. But, its real job is to reach the audience for whom that particular piece of content is being written. The content that can be easily consumed and understood by your target audience is the right content when we refer to SEO content marketing. There are various platforms to publish and promote your content. These platforms include blogging sites, forum communities, social media portals, and digital platforms like Quora, Medium, Hackernoon, etc. Each platform has its own set of guidelines and content marketers have to diligently follow those to get their content published.
Well, neither every organization has a pool of content writers nor do they afford to hire content marketers. However, this limitation does not stop them from doing excellent content marketing for their business and offerings. But, they do find a middle way out to do so. One of them is content syndication.
Content syndication is a mechanism in which third-party websites republish content that originally featured on your company’s blog. Powerful content syndication offers astounding business benefits. They add value to your SEO content marketing. Few of them are explicitly mentioned here, take a look at how content syndication can be a backbone to your SEO strategy.
Boost SEO Efforts
When content syndication is done on third-party websites, you get a chance to link back your website and get a credit as an original publisher. A byline author bio boosts your personal branding and a backlink to your original piece of content adds to your efforts of quality link building. And, in case, the third-party website allows a punchy and compelling call to action, you can get an instant boost in website traffic too.
Promotes Lead Generation
With content syndication on quality, high-authority, and high-volume traffic websites, you are able to reach a greater pie of your target audience. This is obviously much bigger and better than your own website. By republishing your original content, you are meeting your target audience where they are, providing them the information they’re already searching for. When your offerings and expertise reach them, they will try to get more information about you, your offerings, and your value propositions. In a way, you will experience better website traffic and, if not more than, a marginal increase in lead generation.
Greater Exposure And Implicit Promotion
When you syndicate your content, you are rewarded with credit in the forms of author byline, website URL, and social media handles. People will come to know about your online presence. With minimal effort and the same content, you can easily multiply your audience reach and brand exposure. The people who were unaware of your existence may become your followers soon. Just the right piece of content and the right timing to publish on the platform is all that you need. There are some really good portals that allow you to insert backlinks to your sites in the body of the content and on your targeted keyword! Through this, you’re able to tap into a new market as well and with a great potential to create a viral effect for your content.
Augments Brand Reputation
Most of the larger syndication websites have huge social media followings. When they share the syndicated content on their platforms, their followers get to know about it. If not all followers, the ones who actually hold interest in that particular subject will surely click on it and read it. If people believe you’re a credible source, they’re more likely to buy into your message as well and land up on your website or a landing page. Consistently publishing and promoting high-quality content will help you increase your subscribers’ base too. And one fine day, you will be able to position yourself amongst thought leaders within your industry. Hence, content syndication is a key to augment brand reputation in a small amount of time period.
What a great amount of benefits one can get from content syndication! But all good things come with a price! There are SEO challenges involved when you take a shortcut of content syndication to reach your audience and increase your website traffic.
Which are those challenges and how content syndication can hurt your SEO behind your back!
Outranking Your Original Content
Most of the companies publish their blog on their own website and on the very next day or next week republish it on portals like Medium, DZone, etc. of course, the wider segment of audience will be able to see your content on SERPs. But, the content which will rank higher on SERPs won’t be from your web page. On searching with basic search terms, the users will most probably see the syndicated content on the top of your website content. So, you are driving traffic to third-party websites instead of your own website.
Duplicate Content In The Eyes Of Google
Of course content syndication is not the spamming that can get punished by SERP disciplines. But the fact is Google not only hates duplicate content but also punishes the sites that publish such. Though most of the syndication sites manage the content with canonical links, the content is always regarded as “duplicate content”. And, it has to suffer all SEO pitfalls and punishments if syndication is not done correctly. If you don’t inform the Google bot with the original source, it will decide on its own at some point and send the other similar pages into the omitted results.
No Direct Boost In Quality Lead Generation Or Subscribers Base
A really good written piece of content attracts readers to become a regular subscriber. But, if the content gets popular on a third-party website instead of your blog, you lose on the chances to build organic email lists. Readers will indeed subscribe, but not on your portal! On the other hand, you might get inquiry based on your syndicated content, but the chances are lower. At times, it may also happen that the lead you get is not of the quality you have desired.
Summing Up
So, the basic question here is should we do content syndication or not for SEO benefits. Yes, there are challenges associated with content syndication. However, every cloud has a silver lining. You should not worry as long as you’re not spammy. Prior to providing your original content to any third-party website for syndication make sure it’s indexed. And, do not syndicate only for do-follow backlinks. No follow links are also good for SEO. Using nofollow links back to your website will ensure that you won’t get penalized. Nonetheless, if the offer isn’t incentivized, dofollow links are good. Are you planning to update your content syndication strategy to boost your content marketing and SEO efforts? Need any assistance? If so, our bunch of enthusiastic content marketers are ready to serve you at the best. Get in touch!
Originally published at https://www.zealousweb.com.
